PLayful Environment for Inclusive leArning Design in Europe Erasmus Project

Project Title

PLayful Environment for Inclusive leArning Design in Europe

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for school education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Research and innovation; Pedagogy and didactics; Inclusion – equity

Project Summary

With sharply increasing cultural, linguistic and socio-economic diversity in Europe’s school populations, there is urgency to shift towards educational practices that embrace the inclusion of all learners. Learner diversity is now to be viewed as an intrinsic – and positive – characteristic of our schools. Accordingly, we need to support teachers’ endeavours to establish inclusion as a cornerstone of their practice. Many feel ill-prepared to teach classes that are ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse and where learner backgrounds differ markedly from their own. The challenge is to ensure that ALL students, including those facing educational disadvantage, have optimal chances of realizing their potential as students and future European citizens.
PLayful Environment for Inclusive leArning Design in Europe (PLEIADE) responds positively to this scenario by treating it as an opportunity for needs-driven educational innovation powered by teachers’ professional capacity building. PLEIADE supports the efforts of European teachers to systematically integrate inclusive practices in their teaching. It does this by helping them to work together on the design, implementation and sharing of inclusion-oriented learning activity plans. These plans centre on carefully orchestrated learner collaboration, a widely recognized approach not just for strengthening acquisition of curriculum contents but also for supporting inclusive classroom dynamics and attitudes.

PLEIADE’s support for teachers’ capacity building comes in the form of Blended (onsite + online) Training Activities lasting 13 months based on peer collaboration for 75 teachers working in four different schools, who are facing different challenges in terms of learner diversity. These are based on a pathway carefully designed by the project partners and a learning environment encompassing advanced game-like elements drawing on a hybrid (tangible and digital) game (the I4Ts game) and a bespoke gamified platform designed to support teacher interaction, cooperation and, ultimately, collaboration. The tangible version of the game has already been successfully tested in Italian teachers’ professional development.

In PLEIADE, this learning environment will be fully developed and deployed to
– enhance teachers’ engagement in the training experience,
– foster co-creation and sharing of inclusive activity designs,
– support classroom enactment of those activities, and
– promote the sharing and propagation of successful inclusive practices in a teacher community.

PLEIADE engages an immediate target population of about 75 teachers at primary and lower secondary schools in Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, and Cyprus, whose schools are consortium members. The collaborative learning activities designed during training are implemented in the teachers’ classrooms during the project, involving about 600 pupils, many of whom experience educational disadvantage due to cultural, linguistic and socio-economic diversity.
The PLEIADE consortium comprises eight partners from five countries: the National Research Council of Italy, Institute for Educational Technology (project coordinator); the development company OpenLab, in Italy; the UK-based European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN); plus four school organizations located in Italy, Greece, Bulgaria and Cyprus who are facing a range of challenges in terms of students’ socio-economic /cultural disadvantage.

The main activities in PLEIADE involve:
– designing a Blended Teachers’ Professional Development (TPD) pathway in inclusive oriented education enhanced by bespoke tools;
– developing the learning environment to host the online component of the designed pathway, comprising the I4Ts game and a gamified platform (see below);
– delivering Blended Training Activities and support for teachers in the schools involved;
– enacting the classroom activities generated during the training ;
– amplifying impact through exchange of experiences, dissemination of outputs and preparation for transfer to other contexts.

The chief outputs PLEIADE produces are:
– an innovative and gamified blended TPD pathway [O1] dedicated to inclusive education, learning design, and collaborative learning;
– the above mentioned Hybrid I4Ts game [O2] comprising a tangible and a digital components to support teachers’ design of collaborative, inclusion-oriented learning activities;
– a Gamified platform for the Blended Training Activities [O3] providing a scaffolded context for teacher interaction to design PLEIADE – inspired classroom activities and the exchange of related experiences;
– an Open online collection of good practices for inclusion generated by the PLEIADE teacher community;
– an evaluation kit for inclusion-oriented collaborative learning activities;
– a project Impact amplification kit.
These two kits, co-designed with participating teachers, will help implement the project strategy and approach outside consortium contexts.

Project Website

https://pleiade-project.eu

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 449937 Eur

Project Coordinator

CONSIGLIO NAZIONALE DELLE RICERCHE & Country: IT

Project Partners

• 144 Secondary School Narodni Buditeli
• Neapolis Gymnasium
• EUROPEAN DISTANCE AND E-LEARNING NETWORK LBG
• Open Lab S.r.L.
• SOFIA UNIVERSITY ST KLIMENT OHRIDSKI
• Scuola secondaria di 1° grado “Rocca-Bovio-Palumbo”
• S.AYGOULEA-LINARDATOU ANONIMI EKPAIDEFTIKI ETAIRIA